@ssidman: If you have the whole kit, and can get that one running again, a simple examination of the saved file should answer questions on compression techniques.

It depends -- the CASIO might uncompress the data into an ASCII format for upload to the PC, then re-compress it on the download ... as you say, if David can get it working, it will be interesting to take a look at the saved file...

@bwmetz0: This little beauty had a RS232 docking station for syncing with a PC, thus enabling me to keep CSV files with wiring/network/equipment details for pretty much everyone in the company.

It's amazing how fast things have changed -- I remember back in 1998 when I had a small office with a friend wherte we worked in the evenings after our day jobs. We had one 56K modem and a lying cable that we plugged ino the back of whichever machine we wanted to use to upload files to the Internet -- I was blown away when we worked out how to connect the machines together in such a way that either could access the Internet (one at a time) without having to move the modem cable LOL

My dad bought one of these Casios (sometime early nineties), to store contacts and calendar items. Claimed it was much more efficient than the paper Time Manager he used.

Me and my brothers instantly started mocking him (as you can tell we're liberal eurotrash that have no respect for the elders:-), since we saw that it was extremely cumbersome to use. However he did not back down, so we sat back and waited for what must obviously come.

Lo and behold, within a week, I noticed the Casio on my fathers desk.

with a post-it on it.

The post-it had an appointment scribbled down.

After 15 minutes of disrespectful pointing out how the logical conclusion must be that the thing was impractical and therefore useless, he gave in and went back to the Time Manager.

I got a PCMCIA slot for a desktop PC. It fits in a 3.5" slot. My plan was to use my work aircard on it to get internet (we get a 5GB allowance and I hardly use any for work). However DSL has got so cheap I got that (also it lets the wife use it when I am at work).

Sometime I must try and get the HP Jornada going too, it's a lot more advanced than the Casio, probably more in line with yours.

My HP95 has an infrared output to drive a printer, and a serial port to connect to a modem. I haven't used either of these ports.

Instead of a floppy disk, the HP95 has a PCMCIA slot which takes SRAM cards. These are the original PCMCIA battery-backed SRAM cards, not the later cardbus hard-drive-emulating flash cards. The HP95 works with SRAM cards up to 2 megabytes.

MS-DOS formats the SRAM card as if it was a floppy disk. The first 512 bytes of the SRAM are skipped, and the rest of the SRAM is formatted FAT-12 like a floppy disk.

I built hardware to copy the card SRAM data sequentially into an image file on my Linux box. I mount the image file as a FAT-12 device using the loopback filesystem, and then copy my writings from the mounted image file.